A report from February said that many of these employees left because they were being paid too much. An unusual payment system in place allowed early employees to receive scaling pay based on the growth and success of the project, which caused many to no longer need the job security. Urmson, who served as the company’s CTO, almost certainly fell into this category.

Now, Aurora Innovation is made up Urmson himself, Sterling Anderson (who was previously in charge of Tesla’s Autopilot), as well as engineers from Uber, Google, and other companies. Previous reports have said that the team is working on a full stack of hardware and software that can be purchased by car manufacturers hoping to add self-driving capabilities to their vehicles.